EA Redwood Shores borrowed from the combat of Final Fantasy games VII and up, hoping it would be more accessible than the grid-based combat the developer originally planned. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age borrows almost as much from Final Fantasy as it does from Jackson’s movies.
The game takes about as long to beat as the film trilogy takes to watch, and time would be better spent on the latter. These skills, however, rarely help Aragorn’s Quest deviate from monotonous button-mashing. Players step into the boots of the titular ranger and make their way across Middle-earth, reliving the events of the films while they learn a handful of new abilities. The tale of Frodo and the Ring has been deliberately crafted several times over since, leaving the SNES adaptation behind like a bad memory.Īragorn’s Quest is, essentially, a 2010 recap of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. And somewhere between the redundant fetch quests, poor AI, and treks through indistinguishable environments, The Lord of the Rings Vol.
It was preceded by The Hobbit, a text-based adventure on PC that didn’t delve too much into the source material. 1 didn’t have a lot of precedents to follow in 1994. The full-scale war against Sauron and his armies has set the stage for a handful of exceptional video game adaptations, but Conquest isn’t one of them.Īs one of the earlier video game forays into Middle-earth, J.R.R. But the repetitive combat, clunky controls and lack of replayability made the game one of the weaker uses of the legendary encounters in Tolkien’s works. The interstellar battles of Star Wars: Battlefront unfolded gracefully on the Xbox and PS2, and with its own trilogy and wealth of conflicts to draw from, Lord of the Rings Conquest seemed braced for similar success in 2009. Although Faramir never made it to the Black Gate in Jackson’s film, players can bring him into Mordor’s gaping maw over, and over, and over again. But with its second Middle-earth outing in 2003, EA Games expanded the cast of playable characters and allowed players to relive skirmishes however they like. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingĮA’s first attempt at recreating the skirmishes from Peter Jackson’s trilogy wasn’t a failure by any means –– The Two Towers combined a combo-based combat system (a la Devil May Cry) with the environments and characters of the Lord of the Rings films with flying colors. Dozens of characters can be unlocked from across Tolkien’s rich history, and the seemingly endless supply of collectibles is not only a warm invitation to explore Middle-earth, it’s also a reason to stay. It released in 2012, and despite its quirky aesthetic, it’s actually one of the better games set in the Lord of the Rings fiction. TT Games continually makes good use of source material with the LEGO franchise, and LEGO Lord of the Rings is no exception.